Well as you can probably tell from the title, I've managed to finish the remaining marines from Tactical Squad Segundo (about 21:30 last night), which gives me approximately 1900pts of marines finished, plenty to get a 1500pt force on the table even accounting for the heavy HQ bias in that total (a four-man enclave, pedro kantor and cataphractii captain).

As is the usual format with these things, I've therefore taken a load of pictures of them for you to peruse and praise!

Now these aren't quite in their final state, as I really should get them superimposed onto a plain background to remove the brick and newspaper, which would hopefully result in a slightly longer suspension of disbelief! But these will do for now, funky image trickery will come in due course, when I can dissuade myself from spending time on the pc playing Bloodbowl.

Which neatly segue's into the other part of my hobby update.

Saturday saw the arrival of my copy of the new bloodbowl (though I'm having to wait a week for the deathzone supplement, which didn't get sent to my local flgs, grrr).

I can honestly say having had a few mates round on saturday for a gaming night to celebrate me getting older, the new bloodbowl is just as good as the old one, except the models are much better, the bases actually have a little hole in them to hold the ball, and a proper printed copy of the rules is much better than a sheaf of paper print-offs from the CRP. The only down side I could really think of was the range ruler, which despite being pretty cool in concept, did come apart on one occasion whilst hovering over the table, somewhat wrecking the carefully considered placing of many of the models on the pitch.

This doubled with Steam having a sale on the computer version of the game, so I picked that up as well, and added in the Norse team since they're my fave in the game. The new game is definitely an improvement on the previous version, even if you don't get all of the teams included. The gameplay hasn't changed a huge amount, but crucially the graphics are much better.

So, with the Dusk Knights done for a bit, what will I be working on?

As is my usual problem, the answer will be 'everything'. I have a small commission that needs some work putting into it, and my own 30k stuff has also been sadly bereft of attention for far too long. I now have human and orc bloodbowl teams to paint (The Averland Wasps and Da Deff Metallurz will hopefully become a common sight on the bloodbowl fields around Rutland soon).

In recognition of this, today I began work on my Emperor's Children. My intention with these guys is to gradually work the colour scheme up over the whole collection, so everything will get basecoats before I move on to shading and detail work, in contrast to the 'one at a time' method I've used on the Dusk Knights. After all, variety is the spice of life eh?

Eidolon and Kakophoni Squad 1 getting the first lashings of purple, this was a very exciting moment for me, so entirely appropriate to save until my birthday - especially as Eidolon was a present from Rob at 30kplus40k. I got round to using them again this week, with an outing against the Alpha Legion of my good buddy Ryan (see his 40k marines here and some of his alpha stuff here). It was a useful game to learn with, as afterwards we ran a few alternative scenarios to see what would have happened if I'd done stuff differently, which certainly made me understand the potential of some of my units better.

What actually happened was the Kakophoni took first blood (not actually worth anything in the game) as they destroyed a Rhino, taking a few casualties of their own thanks to gets hot, but then they took a bit of a bite out of the Alphas facing me. Eidolon and the Palatine Blades made an impression, wiping out a unit of Alpha Legionnaries in a single combat phase, before the vindicator laser destroyer turned its weapon on the Lord Commander. That's now twice in two games I've left him exposed to an insta-kill shot and failed my invun both times. Although the writing was by then on the wall, the third legion can be spiteful, and my 4-man Kakophoni Squad left a lasting impression, causing so many wounds that Ryan failed three of his teminator saves (he'd had more than enough rolls by then to justify failing a few), the Bio-Psychic Shock of the barrage killing the remaining two warriors. 250+ pts in a single turn to (roughly) 120pts of heavy shooting? I love these guys, even if they're not reliable. I lost of course, but learned a lot more from it than if I'd won (like for example Eidolon could have dealt with the Alpha legion squad on his own, and the Palatine Blades would have seen off the terminators. That might even have led to him not being visible to the laser destroyer later).

Next up on the blog will be various things, I've been writing some team reviews for Bloodbowl over on the brotherhood blog, currently covering humans, orcs, and skaven. They've been really well received so far, so I will continue with them, next up will be dwarves, then the various elf teams and nurgle, before I take a break until GW release the next wave of teams.

I've also got a couple of posts in draft, one on the custom bloodbowl pitch I made/am making for my club and another on the concept of something being overpowered, so keep an eye out for those.